With the 2025 FRC season on the horizon, merely 7 days away. I’m curious, what has been some of your favorite moments from the 2024 season whether it’s in-season or off-season.
Me personally, my favorite moment has to be winning my team’s first ever regional and being the youngest team from Florida to this date to win a Regional tournament. It was the 2nd biggest regional event being Orlando where over 60+ teams competed and we managed to make it out on top with a blue banner and a ticket to Houston just 3 seasons in. Made me proud of not only myself but my team and the hardships we faced through the season.
A 2012 banner was presented at 10,000 Lakes this year. I have the full story. It’s probably my favorite robotics moment ever. Coincidences come full circle.
Backstory leading up to this:
3081 had lost our 2012 10K winner banner several years ago. In September 2023-ish Ryan (alumni of 3081) ordered two 2012 replacements (one for him one for the team), and he received one 2012 10,000 Lakes and one 2024 10,000 Lakes banner. He said he should probably tell someone but got way too swamped helping with FTC teams and didn’t. He and I joked about there being a mix-up in the orders because that might be around the time the banners for the event get ordered, and what if the banner they presented on the field was a 2012 banner, but we didn’t actually think that would happen at all.
Awards ceremony at 10K:
When they got the banner out on the field for awards I thought “oh yeah better check just in case” so I looked and saw it said 2012. I let out a yell, and Ryan started laughing. Soon after people started noticing and the emcee bent down to look at it like “what??” and they swapped banners out. Ryan and I ran down to behind the field and let the event staff know about the mix up and the story behind it. Everyone found it hilarious.
Where this gets better is that Ryan and Cam (great friends to this day) were the drivers for 3081 in 2012 when they won the 10K regional. Cam now is a mentor on 3018- one of the winning teams of the 2024 regional. So his new team won his old banner.
3018 borrowed their partner’s banner for their team photo and the other two teams took the 2024 ones home. We are local to the event so were able to do a banner swap shortly after leaving. So 3018 got their rightful banner that evening, and 3081 got our 2012 banners.
Feels like my favorite should be something more substantive than this, but the first thing that came to mind was at URI seeing 1735’s driver score on himself rather than in the goal.
